Outside Chance

by Lyndon Stacey

  ‘I don’t come cheap,’ he said eventually. ‘And I’ll make no promises.’

  ‘I wouldn’t expect you to come cheap,’

  Truman assured him. ‘I believe in paying well for good work. But neither will I stand for being double-crossed.’ He fixed Ben with a steely eye. ‘I’m not threatening you, I’m just stating the facts. I’m a man as won’t be messed with. Deal fairly with me and I’ll deal fairly with you. Now, on those terms, will you work for me?’

  Still Ben hesitated.

  ‘All right,’ he said finally. ‘But on these terms: I’ll take payment in arrears; I won’t do anything I consider morally wrong; and if I don’t like where my investigations are taking me I’ll drop the case and you’ll owe me nothing.’

  ‘My my, you are a cautious fellow, aren’t you?’

  ‘Just careful.’

  Truman smiled and held out a hand. ‘Very well. It’s a deal.’

  Ben ignored the hand.

  ‘You’d better tell me just what this is all about,’ he said, sitting back on the chair he’d recently vacated. ‘And I want all the details.’

  Truman leaned sideways and opened one of the drawers in his desk. He withdrew a file and took from it a single sheet of paper, which he pushed towards Ben.

  ‘Read that.’

  Ben picked it up. The document was printed on headed notepaper. It had been created by one Cecil Rackham – who resided at Cranleigh Place, Nr Sherborne, Dorset – and recorded the sale, to Edward Truman of Castle Ridge Racing, of a sixteen-hand, eight-year-old bay gelding, registered with Weatherbys as Cajun King, for the sum of £12,000. It had been signed by both parties and witnessed by a third party, and was dated two years previously.

  Ben read it through again and looked up.

  ‘Am I missing something?’

  ‘Look again.’

  Ben looked.

  ‘Nothing … Except perhaps the price? But then, I’m not really au fait with the price of racehorses. Presumably jumpers aren’t anywhere near as valuable as flat horses.’

  ‘Not normally. But take into account the fact that Cajun King had won a top novice chase, just the week before,’ Truman told him. ‘He was actually worth at least three times what I gave Rackham, even then.’

  ‘And now?’

  The trainer shrugged. ‘Whatever anyone is prepared to give. A hundred grand, two? Who’s to say? I wouldn’t sell him at any price.’

  ‘So why did he sell?’

  ‘Because he found himself embarrassingly short of cash just then, and I had the money to hand. And because his marriage was going through a rocky patch and he was desperate that his wife shouldn’t know that he’d spent the money bequeathed to her by her mother.’

  ‘And you threatened to tell her,’ Ben guessed, careful not to show his contempt. ‘That’s a dirty trick but not exactly illegal.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I’m not eager to see it splashed across the sporting pages of the newspapers,’ Truman said.

  ‘And you really think this Rackham might have stolen Cajun King back? What on earth would he do with him?’

  ‘Perhaps he thought he might recover something of what he thinks I owe him.’

  ‘But surely he’d guess you might suspect him. Where on earth could he hide the horse?’

  ‘Where could anyone hide him?’

  ‘At a riding stable perhaps?’ Ben suggested. ‘With a false passport. Or, better still, a racing stable. You know, I can’t help thinking that a bit of publicity might be a good idea. It would make it much more difficult to keep him hidden.’

  ‘No, I can’t risk it. We’ve got to do as they say, whoever they are. I can’t risk them panicking and just shooting him out of hand.’

  Privately, Ben agreed with Hancock that it was highly unlikely that the horse would ever be seen alive again, but he didn’t say so.

  ‘So, can you think of any legitimate reason I might use for approaching Rackham directly, or is it to be a case of rooting round behind the scenes?’

  Truman pursed his lips thoughtfully, but offered none.

  ‘Well, is he an owner, or a trainer? Does he have any other horses? What does he do for a living?’ Ben prompted.

  ‘He’s an owner, and yes, he does have other horses. Two more. Belinda Kepple trains them. I believe he actually has a runner in the Gold Cup himself, an outsider. Fifty to one, I think it was, last time I checked.’

  ‘Well, it’s a start.’ Yawning, Ben got to his feet. ‘I’ll see what I can do, but, as I said, I’m not making any promises. And that’s another thing – I won’t make any threats, either. It sounds to me as though this poor bloke’s had a rough enough deal as it is, so if that’s what you’ve got in mind, you’d better start looking for someone else.’

  ‘Holier than thou, is that it, Copperfield?’ Truman shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. I know what you journalists are like. As twisty as politicians, and about as truthful, in general.’

  Ben raised his eyebrows. ‘You approached me, remember?’

  ‘Yes, well, Ford seemed to think you were a cut above the crowd,’ he said gruffly, clearly uncomfortable with the concept of climbing down. ‘I’m sorry. This business is getting to me. I love my horses, you know.’

  ‘And you’d love to get your hands on that Gold Cup, too.’

  ‘Of course I would. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. We’re all in it for the glory, you know; it’s the name of the game. You don’t compete if you don’t care about winning.’

  ‘Granted. Look, it’s occured to me … I know Cajun King’s a household name but I’m not at all sure I’d recognise him if I were standing next to him. Have you got a photo I could have? And does he have any distinguishing marks – you know, scars, unusual whorls in his coat, or ridges in his hooves? Anything that might identify him amongst all the thousands of other bay thoroughbreds?’

  ‘I got Bess to print these off earlier. Ford has a couple too,’ Truman said, taking a computer-generated colour image from a file on his desk. ‘He has a star on his forehead, slightly to the right, as you face him. No scars I can think of.’

  ‘Is his tail always this short?’ Ben queried, studying the print. The dark bay horse in the picture had a tail like a yearling, bushy but not even reaching his hocks.

  ‘Yeah. It was damaged when he was younger – got it slammed in the horsebox door, apparently – and it’s never grown properly since.’

  ‘Well, that’s something, I suppose.’ Ben folded the picture into his pocket and headed for the door. ‘I’ll be in touch, then.’

  On a final, fleeting visit to the cottage Ben collected his phone and found Mikey enjoying a cup of hot chocolate with Bess and Ian Rice. Ford and Hancock were nowhere to be seen, and Mikey seemed fairly relaxed now.

  Wishing them all a good night, Ben went out to the Mitsubishi. As he opened the door of the vehicle a small whiskery face appeared, blinking as the interior light came on, and Mouse, Ben’s whippet-sized grey lurcher, sat up, stretched and yawned.

  ‘Hello, sausage. Need to go pennies?’

  Her big, dark eyes regarded him for a moment from under her brows and then she got up, turned round, and lay down again with a small sigh.

  ‘Suit yourself.’ Ben climbed in, started the engine and set off on the twenty-minute journey home.

  On waking the following morning, his first thought was that it was nice to be in his own bed after a couple of weeks on the move. His second, accompanied by a vague sense of unease, was to wonder what he’d let himself in for. He’d turned freelance to avoid having to work for people he didn’t like, and there was no denying that his first experience of the Castle Ridge trainer had placed the man firmly in that category.

  As always when returning home after a few days away, Ben had slept deeply and long, and his thoughts were soon interrupted by Mouse’s appearance beside his bed, resting her chin on the quilt and plainly suggesting that it was time he got up to let her out.

  With a groan he slid out of bed and m
ade his way through the single-storey building to the French doors, stepping carefully from rug to rug to avoid the chill of the stone floor on his bare feet. Dairy Cottage was part of a small development of rented-out converted farm buildings around a central courtyard. Low walls partitioned off a parking space for each residence on the inside of the square and they all had a walled garden on the outside, backing on to fields. Inside, the rooms retained many of their original features, but the lofty beamed ceilings and stone floors that kept them beautifully cool in summer also meant that they required a fair amount of heating in winter.

  Mouse followed, head and tail low, patiently listening to Ben’s mutterings about troublesome females who wouldn’t allow a bloke the luxury of a few minutes’ lie-in. Opening the arched French windows in the dining room, Ben let her out into the pocket-handkerchief-sized garden. Surrounded by five-foot-high stone and flint walls and well-stocked borders, the frosted lawn sparkled in the morning sunlight and ice coated the water in the central birdbath. Mouse picked her way delicately over the grass to attend to business and Ben turned back into the house to answer his own call of nature, put the kettle on, and fire up the wood-burner.

  Some three-quarters of an hour later, having showered, dressed, fed Mouse, and satisfied his inner man with a plate of bacon sandwiches and a cup of coffee, he wistfully put aside the Sunday paper and tried to apply his mind to the matter of the missing racehorse.

  Although he’d agreed to go and see the horse’s former owner, he didn’t really hold out much hope of discovering anything useful. With Cajun King’s disappearance a secret, there was a limit to the amount of probing he could do without giving the game away. Personally, he thought it incredible that anyone should have taken the horse at all; the logistics were horrendous. And if the motive was revenge for some past grievance, then surely it would have been easier, and just as effective, to destroy the horse where it had stood, in the horsebox.

  He thought back to his encounter with Truman and reflected that rumours he’d heard – of the man having clawed his way to the top, in business and racing, over the bodies of several less ambitious men – were probably all too true. Such a man could have made any number of enemies in the course of his career.

  Waking up his PC to download the professional scribblings of the past few days from his laptop, Ben checked his email, deleted the spam, read and replied to a couple of others and then stayed online to call up his favourite search engine. He entered the words ‘Cajun King’.

  The resulting list was impossibly long so he tried again, adding the keyword ‘Rackham’, which produced something a little more manageable.

  Scrolling through, he found that the majority of listed sites were connected to the artist, Arthur Rackham, but there were a few besides. The most promising was an excerpt from a newspaper article which, when Ben went to the website, proved to be an account of the surprise sale of the horse, just days after his first major success. The sale price was not recorded, but it was speculated that a ‘pretty penny’ was likely to have changed hands between the eminent surgeon, Dr Cecil Rackham, and an up-and-coming owner and trainer, Eddie Truman. Better known as a flat trainer, it was the columnist’s opinion that ‘bluff Yorkshireman, Eddie,’ would be just as successful over the sticks. Ben wondered who had notified the press. In view of what he’d learned, it was unlikely to have been Rackham.

  As he severed the internet connection the telephone immediately began to ring.

  ‘Ben?’ It was Truman and, from the sound of it, he was on a mobile and in a vehicle.

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘Just to let you know we’ve heard from the kidnappers.’

  ‘Oh, right. And?’

  ‘Bess found an email first thing this morning. They say they have Cajun King; he’s unharmed but if we talk to the police they’ll shoot him. They say they want half a million in used notes and they’ll be in touch with the details.’

  ‘That’s a hell of a lot!’ Ben exclaimed. ‘Realistically, that’s more than he’s worth, isn’t it?’

  ‘Ford reckons they’re trying it on. He thinks they’ll take less, if we can only set up some form of two-way communication.’

  ‘If it was email, isn’t it traceable?’

  ‘Yes, but he reckons they’ll probably have used an internet café and opened an account under a false name. Ford thinks it’s unlikely they’ll use that connection again.’ Truman sounded depressed. ‘All this technology, and it’s still impossible to pin people down.’

  ‘Mmm. And you can’t even be one hundred per cent sure the horse is still alive. Can you organise that much money in a hurry?’

  ‘I’ll need a few days to sell off some stock, but it shouldn’t be a problem. Anyway, I must go. Third lot is just going out and I’m on my way up to watch. Will you be able to do anything about Rackham today?’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll call on him this morning.’

  Ben rang off and sat staring thoughtfully at the phone; then, on an impulse, he picked up the receiver and tapped in a mobile number.

  It was answered after only a few rings.

  ‘Yeah, Ben. How are you?’ Mark Logan was a friend of some three or four years’ standing, and a useful one, being a member of the Dorset Constabulary. Initially their work had thrown them together but now, although their paths rarely crossed, Ben considered the policeman one of his few real friends.

  ‘Not so bad,’ he replied. ‘And you?’

  ‘Knackered,’ came the succinct response. ‘Half my bloody shift has taken a sickie this week. Anyway, what can I do for you?’

  ‘Well, actually, I wanted to ask a little favour.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Why “Hmm …”?’

  ‘Because – as I recall – the last time you wanted to ask me a “little favour” it involved three weeks’ work and two broken fingers on my part!’

  ‘Ah, but I only asked for info – it was your decision to get involved.’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t leave an amateur bumbling around on his own, could I?’ Logan observed provocatively. ‘Anyway, what is it this time?’

  ‘A little matter of a missing racehorse; do you know about it?’

  ‘Er … Be more specific,’ he hedged.

  ‘Eddie Truman; Cajun King; a lay-by outside Guildford?’

  ‘Yeah, all right. Just checking. Can’t be too careful with you reporters.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that to you,’ Ben protested.

  ‘So, how did you get on to it so quickly? It’s not even common knowledge at the nick.’

  Ben explained about Mikey. ‘DI Ford bought my silence with the promise of an exclusive,’ he added. ‘And Truman tried to do the same with threats. But then he decided I might be useful to him. If I were to give you a name, would you be honour-bound to pass it on to Ford?’

  ‘Well, I should do … ’

  ‘I didn’t say should, I said would,’ Ben pointed out.

  ‘If it were told to me in complete confidence, I’d respect that, unless someone’s life depended on it.’

  ‘OK. Truman put me on to a guy called Cecil Rackham, who used to own the horse. He’s a surgeon, I think. Anyway, there’s some bad blood between them. I wondered if you could run a check on him. And also on Truman himself, while you’re about it.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t want much then?’ Logan enquired sarcastically. ‘Actually, I’ve already run a quick check on Truman.’

  ‘For Ford?’

  ‘No. For myself. I was curious. You know, self-made millionaire; rags to riches. They don’t usually get there without treading on somebody’s toes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘A few well-greased palms here and there. The odd spot of muscling in. Nothing actionable, that I could find. Lately, many good works – including quite large sums of money for underprivileged and abused youngsters, and a sizeable contribution to the hospital scanner appeal. A veritable pillar of the community. Rumour has it, he’s up for a knighthood.’

  ‘Are you serious?�
�

  ‘Strings are being industriously tugged.’

  ‘Well, well,’ said Ben, his mind busy.

  ‘Look, I’ll see what I can do, and be in touch soonest. Must go now, I’m on “obbo” and things are moving.’

  ‘Thanks, Mark. Speak to you soon.’

  A knighthood? That was interesting. No wonder Mikey’s boss was keen to avoid any breath of scandal.

  The morning was wearing on and, after stoking up the wood-burner, shutting down the dampers and coaxing the reluctant Mouse from her position on the rug in front of it, Ben set off to find Cecil Rackham, blithely putting out of his mind the pile of mail that had wedged under the front door when he let himself in last night, and that now sat on the coffer in the hall.

  Cranleigh Place was found without difficulty, after enquiring at the local post office and convenience store, and Dr Rackham answered the gleaming white door in person and in his dressing gown, looking tousled and bleary-eyed. He was carrying a Sunday paper under his arm and, on the hall table behind him, Ben could just see a tray laden with teapot, cups, saucers, toast in a rack and marmalade.

  He just managed to avoid glancing at his watch. A late breakfast in bed; very nice. And not quite the behaviour – one would imagine – of a man involved in the risky business of kidnapping a world-class steeplechaser and holding it to ransom.

  ‘Dr Rackham? Cecil Rackham?’ Ben enquired, with his best apologetic smile. ‘I’m sorry to have called so early on a Sunday, but I wasn’t sure when else I’d find you in …’

  ‘Yes, well, what do you want?’ Rackham was short and rather plump, with thin, greying hair and moist-looking pale skin. He was quite possibly a very pleasant man but at that moment he looked less than encouraging.

  ‘I’m a journalist,’ Ben announced, showing his press card and noticing Rackham’s slight withdrawal. That meant nothing. Almost everyone, except perhaps the most desperate minor celebrities, showed that reaction. ‘Ben Copperfield. I’m doing a feature on the Cheltenham hopefuls, and I wondered if you’d mind saying a few words about Tuppenny Tim’s chances in the Gold Cup.’

  ‘If you were a journalist worth his salt, you’d know that the horse is thought to have little or no chance in the Gold Cup. He’s a fifty-to-one outsider.’ The door closed a few inches.